Theology
980 to 1037, Bukhara, Persia
Existence, necessity, and the nature of the soul.
Start learning Ibn →Ibn Sina’s elegant proof that, beneath all the contingent things that might not have existed, there must be one Necessary Existent that cannot not exist.
Ibn Sina’s deceptively simple distinction - between what a thing is and that it is - which reshaped a thousand years of metaphysics.
Ibn Sina’s dazzling thought experiment - a man created in mid-air, in total sensory blankness, who would still be certain of his own self - six centuries before Descartes.
Ibn Sina’s theory of how the human mind comes to know - by receiving the forms of things from a cosmic ‘Active Intellect,’ the last of the heavenly minds.
Ibn Sina’s grand cosmology - the entire universe emanating, by necessity, from the absolute unity of God through a cascade of intellects, and the storm it provoked.
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